While privilege exists, justice can't be achieved.

More jobs –> less recidivism

Click this image of Abashiri Station, Hokkaido to learn how it relates to recidivism. Image credit: David McKelvey .license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Many of us have long assumed that a strong demand for labor results in less crime. At least, less of the kind of crime people get imprisoned for. And of course we assume this works most strongly for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, a category which includes most of those released after serving time in prison.

Now we have a study (or more precisely, a report on a study because the original source is behind a paywall) which confirms this assumption. Basically, those released into a strong economy are less likely to return to prison than those released in slack times. Because the study was apparently done at the county level, there would be enough cases that it’s not a statistical artifact. From the abstract:

[B]eing released to a county with higher low-skilled wages significantly decreases the risk of recidivism. The impact of higher wages on recidivism is larger for both black offenders and first-time offenders, and in sectors that report being more willing to hire ex-offenders. These results are robust to individual- and county-level controls…

So, since taxing privilege rather than production is an economic development tool, we can also assert that it is an anti-crime measure.